[Django]-Why is django.test.client.Client not keeping me logged in

Just happened to me when retesting an app that has been working and forgotten for some months.

The solution (apart from updating to Django 1.2) is Patch #11821. In short, Python 2.6.5 has some bugfix in the Cookie module, triggering an edge case bug in the test client.

I use RequestContext to get the logged in user into the template context.

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.template import RequestContext

@login_required
def index(request):
   return render_to_response('page.html',
                             {},
                             context_instance=RequestContext(request))

and in the template

{% if user.is_authenticated %} ... {{ user.username }} .. {% endif %}

This works as expected (I don’t get to this page without logging in, and when I get there, the username is present in response.content) when driven through the test client.